Updated September 2026 with current figures and terms.
The short answer
A move is two renovation decisions, not one. There is the work the home you are leaving may or may not need before it lists, and there is the work the home you are buying will need after you close. The pay-at-closing structure can fund either one, and it is repaid out of a closing rather than out of your savings. Whether it is worth doing on either end is a separate question, and the answer is frequently no.
This post explains the mechanics, states the terms exactly, and is honest about what the outside data says about renovation returns.
The first decision: the home you are leaving
The case for renovating before you list is not that renovation is free money. It is that a buyer looking at a dated house is already pricing in the work, plus their own contingency, plus the inconvenience. When you do the work, you are trading a known cost for that unknown discount.
Sometimes that trade is good. Often it is not. The outside evidence is blunt about this: in NAR's 2025 Remodeling Impact Report, a complete kitchen renovation was estimated to recover 60% of its cost at resale, a bathroom renovation 50%, and a new primary suite 54%. The only project on that list estimated to recover 100% was a new steel front door.
So the right pre-sale scope is usually narrow: condition, not taste. Paint, flooring, the failed roof, the dead landscaping, the things a buyer's inspector will find. Not a dream kitchen.
The second decision: the home you are buying
This is where most people lose more money than they realize, because they do it in the worst possible order: close, move in, live in it for two years, then renovate around the furniture at retail prices in stages.
Doing the work between closing and move-in is cheaper and faster for boring practical reasons. The house is empty, so trades are not working around your life. The scope is decided once instead of drifting. You are not paying twice to protect finished surfaces.
The same pay-at-closing structure can fund renovating the home a customer is buying. That is not a special program, it is the same contract applied to a different closing.
What it actually costs, stated exactly
Here are the terms, with nothing softened:
- Nothing upfront, nothing during the work, and no monthly payments. The balance is repaid out of closing.
- What is repaid is the fixed contract price on the signed estimate, plus Washington sales tax, plus any change orders you signed, plus the county recording fee.
- There is no interest during the renovation and none for six months after the work is finished. If the home has not closed by then, the balance accrues 1.5% per month. Paying it off early stops the interest.
- Ten months after the work is finished, the balance is due directly, whether or not the home has sold.
- The balance is secured by a deed of trust recorded against the property. You sign it in front of an independent notary before work starts, and it is released within ten business days of payoff.
- The price is fixed. Every scope change is a signed change order before the work is done. The work carries a one year written workmanship warranty.
FLYP earns a normal general contractor margin, and that margin is built into the fixed price. There is no program fee and no percentage of your sale. FLYP is not a brokerage and takes no share of anyone's commission.
You can lose money or equity doing this. The market can move and a home can sell for less than projected. The full plain-language summary is at how the process works.
Do not forget the costs that have nothing to do with renovation
When people sketch a move on the back of an envelope they usually forget the transaction itself. In Washington, the seller normally pays a graduated real estate excise tax that starts at 1.1% of the price and rises with it, on top of commission, escrow, title and prorated taxes. A renovation that looks marginal before you add those costs looks worse after.
Talk to a CPA before you assume a gain is tax free. Primary residence rules have conditions, and this is not tax advice.
What FLYP's own files show
We are not going to show you a customer story, because none of our homes has sold yet and a story about an unsold house is not evidence.
As of September 2026, FLYP had completed underwriting on 16 homes. Of those, 4 went on to a signed contract, 4 are on hold, and 5 did not proceed. Three renovations have been finished. None has been listed and none has sold, so there are no sale prices and no seller outcomes to report.
On the 12 files that carry a projected after renovation value, the projected lift over as-is value had a median of 27%, with a range from 1% to 89%. The projected dollars added had a median of $190,000 and ranged from $10,000 to $500,000. Every one of those numbers is a projection made in our underwriting, not a result.
That 1% at the bottom of the range matters more than the 89% at the top. It is the file where the honest answer was that renovating would not pay, and where the right advice was to list as-is or not to sell at all.
Renovation budgets on 15 of those files had a median of $80,000, ranging from $10,000 to $355,000, with 5 under $50,000 and 3 above $150,000. Nine of those are the fixed price on an estimate we actually sent; the rest are underwriting budgets. And for the three jobs that have both a start and a finish date, the work took between 6 and 33 days on site, which tells you how much scope drives schedule and why we will not quote a typical timeline.
If you are not selling, this is not your tool
If you love the house and you are staying, pay-at-closing is the wrong instrument, because there is no closing to be paid from. The conventional options are a home equity line of credit or a home equity loan, and rates move: Bankrate put the national average HELOC rate at 7.11% as of September 16, 2026. FLYP also does conventional paid remodeling that you fund yourself, which is simply a remodel with a contract and a price.
Where this does not fit
Be skeptical of the two-sided version of this if:
- Your projected lift is thin. A few percent does not justify the disruption on either end.
- Your timeline is tight. Ten months is not a long time if a listing sits.
- You are buying in a competitive situation where a renovation contingency weakens your offer.
- You would need to borrow against the new home anyway. Then compare the real alternatives directly.
What the market looks like right now
Buyers have more choice than they did a year ago. The Northwest MLS counted 24,675 active listings at the end of August 2026 against 20,219 a year earlier, a 22.0% increase, with roughly 4.21 months of inventory across its service area.
That cuts both ways for a move. Condition matters more when buyers can be choosy, which strengthens the case for pre-sale work. It also means the home you are buying may be more negotiable, which can be a better use of your attention than a renovation.
The bottom line
Selling one home and renovating another is a sequencing problem, not a magic trick. The structure exists so that a lack of cash does not force the worst version of the sequence. It does not make renovation free, it promises nothing about your sale price, and on plenty of houses the right answer is to do very little.
If you want the honest numbers for your two addresses, start at get started.
